Stark
Young

Editors note: This
article originally appeared in the book Lives
of Mississippi Writers, 1817-1967, edited by James B. Lloyd
(Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1980). It is reprinted here by permission.

Stark Young, born in Como,
Mississippi, 11 October 1881, is the most cosmopolitan and multi-talented
of the state’s major literary figures. Widely traveled—especially
in Italy, England, and France—thoroughly familiar with Greek,
Latin, and English literature, a poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist,
translator, painter, professor, letterwriter and brilliant conversationalist,
Young achieved distinction in a number of artistic fields; but he
is perhaps best remembered for his weekly essays on the drama which
appeared in the New Republic formore than twenty
years and for his best-selling novel of Mississippi during the Confederacy,
So Red the Rose. Throughout his long career, Young retained
the characteristically Southern attitudes which he acquired during
his youth in Mississippi.

The origins of Stark
Young’s art lie deeply rooted in the family traditions of
his parents. His mother, Marv Clark Starks (1858-1890), was the
daughter of Caroline Charlotte McGehee (1821-1861) and Stephen Gilbert
Starks ( 1816-1859), a Methodist preacher. The McGehees had originally
emigrated from Scotland to Virginia in the seventeenth century,
pushed south to Georgia, and then moved westward first to Alabama,
then Mississippi, and. eventually, even to Texas. The influence
of this enormous, sprawling family upon Young cannot be overstated.
From them he received a lasting admiration for family life, a

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sense of belonging, an awareness
of his own identity, and a commitment to high personal standards
of honor and integrity. Much of Young’s Southerness and his
agrarian humanism derives from the McGehees to whom he always referred
as “my people.”

In December, 1880, Mary Clark Starks
married Alfred Alexander Young (1847-1925), a doctor then practicing
in Como. Like the McGehees, the Youngs originated in England, emigrated
to Virginia, moved south and then westward into Tennessee and Mississippi.
At the age of sixteen, Stark Young’s father enlisted in the
Confederate army. He fought in skirmishes near Memphis and Holly
Springs and later in battles at Vicksburg, Jackson, and Atlanta.
After the war, he studied for a year at the University of Mississippi
and latter received a degree in medicine from the University of
Pennsylvania Medical School. Stark Young was proud of his father’s
understanding of humanity, his compassion for the sick and the poor,
and the Southern principles which he instilled into Stark and his
younger sister Julia.

In 1880, when Stark was approaching
nine, his mother died. Unquestionably, her death was one of the
most significant events in his life. Writing as an old man in The
Pavilion, Young could still remember her face and the day of
her death and funeral. His life and that of his sister Julia were
permanently changed from that moment. They went to live with their
uncle Hugh McGehee, although later Julia, and at times Stark, would
live with their two aunts, who taught in a number of female seminaries
in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Most of Young’s childhood
was spent in Como. In 1895, however, Doctor Young remarried and
moved to Oxford.

Stark Young finished his preparatory
schooling in Oxford and entered the University of Mississippi. A
strong student, he took courses in English literature, Latin, and
history, along with the required work in science and mathematics.
He joined a fraternity, wrote poetry, and edited the college annual.
Young had no interest in athletics; and despite references in his
poetry to romantic scenes with girls, he had few dates. His homosexual
tendencies may have begun to trouble him during this period. In
June 1901, at the age of nineteen, he was graduated.

In the fall of 1901, Young entered
the graduate school of Columbia University as a student in English.
At that time the Columbia English department was probably the finest
in the country. Brander Matthews, under whom Young took considerable
work, was widely held to be America’s leading theatre critic.
He encouraged his students to attend Broadway plays which he used
as practical examples for his drama criticism and literary theories.
Young saw the leading actors and actresses of the period, including
Elenora Duse, Maude Adams, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Julia Marlowe,
Mrs. Minnie Madern Fiske, Otis Skinner, E. H. Sothern, John Drew,
and Lionel Barrymore. In June 1902, he was awarded the master of
arts degree. Already he possessed much of the blend of scholarship
and personal charm that later made him a popular teacher and a successful
critic.

After a brief period as a newspaper
reporter in New York, Young went to the mountains of North Carolina
to “rusticate” himself during the winter of 1902. There
he read Spenser, Keats, Ovid, Virgil, and the Greek tragedies, and
wrote poetry, some of which later appeared in The Blind Man at
the Window (1906). Eventually he decided not to return to New
York but to accept an instructorship at a military academy in Water
Valley, a few miles south of Oxford, in order to be near his father.
In the following April, however, the school closed and in the fall
he joined the University of Mississippi faculty as an assistant
in English.

For slightly more than a decade
and a half, Young enjoyed a brilliant career as a university professor,
first at the University of Mississippi, then at the University of
Texas, and finally at Amherst College. While at Mississippi, he
published his volume of poems, The Blind Man at the Window, and
a verse play entitled Guenevere (1906). At Texas, his classes
were extremely popular with the students. In 1909, he founded the
Curtain Club, a little theatre organization which soon received
national recognition. For it he wrote a number of one-act plays,
published as Addio, Madretto and Other Plays (1912). He also
founded the Texas Review, a successful scholarly and critical
journal. At Amherst, where his teaching was even more popular than
it had been in Texas, Young began to contribute essays to the New
Republic, the Nation, the North American Review, and
the Yale Review. In 1919, Young took a year’s leave
of absence to study and write in Spain and Italy. By this time,
he was also contributing to the Bookman, the Dial,
and Theatre Arts Magazine, where his full-length play, At
the Shrine, was published. Eventually, his interest in the theatre
led him to believe that he could leave teaching and become a free
lance writer in New York. In 1921, at the age of forty, he resigned
from Amherst and began a second professional career.

Shortly after Young moved to New
York, Herbert Croly, founder and editor of the New Republic,
invitedYoung to become drama critic for the magazine
and to join its editorial board, positions he held until his retirement
in 1947. He also became an editor of Theatre Arts Magazine. His
second full-length play, “The Queen of Sheba,” appeared
in Theatre Arts

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[Page 486]

Magazine; and in 1923 Charles
Scribner’s Sons published The Flower in Drama, the
first of Young’s books about the theatre. It was followed
in 1926 by Theatre Practice and in 1927 by The Theatre,
works that have become standard textbooks in schools of acting.
With them, Young’s reputation as an authority on the drama
was firmly established in New York theatrical circles.

Young’s energy during the
decade of the 1920’s was amazing. In addition to his weekly
reviews for the New Republic and monthly contributions to
Theatre Arts Magazine he wrote for several other periodicals,
lectured on the history of drama at the New School for Social Research,
wrote plays, and actually directed others. In 1923, he directed
the Theatre Guild’s production of Henri Lenormand’s
The Failures; in 1924 his play The Saint was produced
at the Greenwich Village Theatre; and in the following year his
play The Colonnade was staged in London by the London Stage
Society. In 1924, Scribner’s brought out Young’s book
of sketches, mostly set in Texas and Italy, The Three Fountains.

In 1924, Adolph Ochs, publisher
of the New York Times, offered Young the position of drama
critic for the paper. For the next year, his reviews of Broadway
plays appeared several times a week, even daily, in the Times;
then abruptly Young resigned and went back to the New Republic.
Young’s resignation was prompted by the circumstances of newspaper
reviewing. He disliked having to write plot summaries and advertising
“plugs” for performances he had witnessed only a few
moments earlier. Writing for the weekly New Republic or the
monthly Theatre Arts Magazine gave him an opportunity to
select the play he would review, to read it before attending the
performance, to see it more than once if he wished, and to reflect
upon every aspect of it. Drama criticism written in this fashion
was simply not possible to a critic employed by a daily newspaper.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Stark
Young wrote some of the best drama criticism since Coleridge and
Hazlitt. His success was based upon his thorough knowledge of dramatic
literature, his grasp of the technical problems of play production
made possible by his experience as a director, his superb understanding
of the nuances of the spoken word, and his great sensitivity to
color, line, form, and tone. More than anyone else writing about
the theatre at this time, Young saw a play production as an artistic
whole, an entity that was far more than the sum of its individual
parts. What he wrote should be called creative criticism, criticism
that illuminated the production both for the audience and for the
performers. Young was, of course, fortunate that he lived at a time
when the American theatre was enjoying its finest moments both in
terms of plays and in terms of performers, directors, and scene
designers. Although the lapse of time has diminished the immediacy
of some of his work, many of Young’s reviews, particularly
those collected and reprinted in Glamour (1925) and in Immortal
Shadows (1948), retain a compelling appeal for those concerned
with drama.

Young’s creative engergy during
these years extended beyond the drama to fiction. Between 1926 and
1934, he wrote four novels about Mississippi: Heaven Trees
(1926), The Torches Flare (1928), River House (1929),
and So Red the Rose (1934). In these volumes and in the long
essay which he wrote for the conclusion to I’ll Take My
Stand (1930), Young defined his Southern, agrarian philosophy
of life. For the most part, his characters were members of the McGehee,
Starks, and Young families. Heaven Trees takes its form from
the recollections of the boyhood of the narrator Hugh Stark. What
Young endeavors to define in these loosely connected stories are
the values of family life, the virtues that come “always of
the heart,” and the wisdom to be gained from contact with
the land.

In The Torches Flare, Young
advanced the time from 1850 to the 1920s and moved his locale from
Como, Mississippi, to “Clearwater,” a thinly disguised
fictional name for Oxford. Part of the novel, however, takes place
in New York City. Young presented the contrast between life in the
metropolitan city and that of a small Mississippi town, the opposition
between the life of a creative artist in the city and the student
in the academic ivory tower of the Southern university, and the
clash of values represented by industrialism and agrarianism. The
leading character faces the problem Young himself faced: life in
Mississippi was more satisfying than life in New York, but only
in New York could he find the theatre.

In River House, Young indicated
his awareness of the erosion of Southern family life and the depressing
effects of industrialization. Still, he defended the basic validity
of the traditional Southern emphasis upon man’s responsibility
to his fellowmen in society and the need of every man to relate
to a code or standard outside himself. At the end of this novel,
the hero abandons the old Southern mansion for a job in St. Louis,
but he takes with him the conviction that the Southern ideal of
the “life of the affections” and social responsibility
will be valid guides to purposeful conduct wherever he lives.

In his brilliant essay “Not
in Memoriam, but in Defense,” written for the agrarian manifesto
Ill Take My Stand, Young rephrased the principles he
had stated in his fiction. His opening comment reflects his basic
approach to Southern history: “If anything is clear, it is

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that we can never go back, and
neither this essay nor any intelligent person that I know in the
South desires a literal restoration of the old Southern life….
But out of any epoch in civilization there may arise things worthwhile.”
Young endeavored to show in his fiction and in this essay the “worthwhile
things” that should survive out of the Southern tradition.
Among them were, in his words, “a certain fineness of feeling,
an indefinable code for yourself and others, and a certain continuity
of outlook.” He also insisted upon the individual’s
self-control, fairness to others, obedience to law, and respect
for the social order. The essay was both a summary of his philosophy
and a premise paper for So Red the Rose.

By far his most successful novel,
So Red the Rose deals with the fortunes of the McGehee family
during the Civil War, though the war lies only in the background.
Young’s real objective was to contrast Northern industrial
society with Southern agrarianism. The former he criticized upon
the grounds that it lacks a commitment to humanism and stresses
material goods over moral values. Young sought to preserve out of
the Southern tradition primarily its emphasis upon right living,
what Young called “the life of the affections.”

Throughout the 1930’s, Young
continued to write drama criticism for the New Republic. During
the summers, when he was not expected to review plays, he wrote
essays dealing with other subjects. In 1930, Scribner’s published
The Street of the Island, a collection of his short stories;
and in 1935 Feliciana, a group of sketches and essays relating
to the McGehee family and Young’s travels in Italy. Near the
end of the decade, Young began to sense a decline in the quality
of Broadway production. One sign of the trend was the frequency
of revivals of repertory pieces. They afforded Young, however, an
opportunity to write excellent criticism of such established dramas
as Shaw’s Candida; Shakespeare’s Richard II,
Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, and The Tempest; Chekhov’s
The Sea Gull; Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, andSophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Among new plays of value,
he wrote splendid critical essays about Tennessee Williams’s
The Glass Menagerie and O’Neill’s The Iceman
Cometh. In 1938, he translated Chekhov’s The Sea Gull
for the production by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Subsequently,
he translated Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard,
and Uncle Vanya, which Random House collected and published
in 1956.

Despite his successes, Young’s
personal life during the 1930s and 1940s was not entirely happy.
After Croly’s death in 1930, Young found the atmosphere at
the New Republic considerably changed. The new editor, Bruce
Bliven, was not nearly so enthusiastic about Young’s work
as Croly had been; and Young’s views did not correspond with
those of other members of the staff. In 1936, the sudden death of
his nephew, Stark Young Robertson, at Yale, saddened the remainder
of his life. In 1939, he wrote a musical comedy, first entitled
“Belle Isle” but later “Artemise,” for his
friends the Lunts. At first the Lunts professed great admiration
for the work but delayed performing it. In 1942, Young was dismayed
to learn that they would perform S. N. Behrman’s The Pirate,
which Young thought contained much that originated in his own
play. His bitterness over “Artemise,” his belief that
the theatre was declining, and the difficulties at the New Republic
combined to push Young into retirement, though he did not formally
resign his position with the magazine until 1947.

Although retired, Young continued
his life in the arts. For years he had occasionally painted landscapes
and flowers. What had been an infrequent pastime now became an important
part of his life. In 1943, his work received a “one man”
show under the sponsorship of the Friends of Greece, and in 1945
the Rehn Galleries held another exhibit wholly devoted to his work.
Both exhibits received enthusiastic reviews from New York art critics.
In 1951, he published his autobiography, The Pavilion, an
account of his life in Mississippi to age twenty-one. Retirement
brought additional opportunities for travel. During the 1950s with
William M. Bowman, Young’s friend for many years, he made
several trips to Italy and Greece and often spent the summer months
with his sister in Austin, Texas. In May 1959, Young suffered a
stroke; and although he partially recovered, his activities were
severely curtailed. He died 6 January 1963, two weeks after his
sister died in Texas. Bowman brought Young’s body back to
Como, where he was interred in Friendship Cemetery.

Young’s place in American
cultural history and, particularly, in the Southern renascence of
the 1920’s and 1930’s is assured. Perhaps more than
anyone else in his generation, his life was wholly devoted to the
arts. Highly gifted, admired, well liked though occasionally feared,
witty, and superbly educated, Young, as Harold Clurman has said,
“stood for something.” His kind of impressionistic drama
criticism remains unique in its field. Few if any critics have had
his exquisite sense of what is “right” in the theatre,
and almost no one has been able to articulate his feelings about
the drama to the degree that Young achieved. He wrote both criticism
and fiction from the Southern position which he defined in his work
and illustrated in his life. He was above all things else, a humanist
dedicated to the art of living well. He will remain a significant
per-